The Mail-Order Rifle That Never Reached Guadalcanal

The internet tells a tidy story about Lieutenant John George: a sixty-dollar mail-order Winchester his officers mocked, and eleven Japanese snipers killed with it in four days on Guadalcanal. His own 1947 memoir says otherwise — the famous rifle never reached the island at all. A ruined barrel and a troopship schedule kept it an ocean away, so a state rifle champion built his own sniper rifle from a hand-picked Springfield and a scope his family mailed to the Pacific. What he did with it is stranger than the legend.